With HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) having placed caps on undergraduate home (ie. not international) student numbers for many universities, a lot are looking around for new places to expand. Two areas are providing room for that expansion: foundation degrees, which are two-year courses developed in partnership with industry, awarded by universities but delivered in further education colleges; and international partnerships. Both are examples of what’s known as ‘collaborative provision’, which has become a particular emphasis of mine over the past few months.
As a member of the University of Reading’s Sub-Committee on Collaborative Provision and Board for Teaching and Learning I’ve found myself reading reports on visits to a number of colleges both in the UK and overseas. We have collaborative arrangements with Chiang Mai University in Thailand, Taylor’s College in Malaysia, and a university in Beijing, among others. Under most of these international arrangements, students start out studying in their home country and then spend some time studying in the UK before receiving degrees awarded by the University of Reading. Sadly I haven’t managed to blag myself any trips to visit these institutions.
Despite our growth in these areas, I haven’t yet heard anyone talking about expansion plans along the lines of the University of Nottingham, which last week announced a £40 million plan to open a campus in China. We find it hard enough to make sure our second campus gets due consideration from student officers and University officials. I’m not sure I even want to contemplate the logistics of doing that for a campus in Malaysia.
I can’t believe that Nottingham’s will be the only project of this sort over the next few years. Higher Education in the UK desparately needs more funding and one of the few routes to that is through increasing the number of international students. While British HE tries to hang on to its prestigious image it is likely (perhaps inevitable) that many of its institutions will try to cash in on that image and expand their brand.
The key danger of course is that universities go the way of many other multinationals, with the management becoming further removed from the members, and change becoming still harder to effect. In order to be managed in the interests of the members, campuses abroad will need to have almost entirely distinct structures which will likely be less cost-effective than more remote management structures. And guarantees of fair hearings for students, which in the UK are enshrined in legislation (both through acts of parliament and university statutes) will need to be rethought because of the more complex logistics and hazier legal context.
This may be an inevitable result of present circumstance, but is the globalisation of higher education really the best way forward for academic diversity?